


Touching Me, Touching You

by darknesscrochets



Series: Rainbow Souls [1]
Category: Rusty Quill Gaming (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Platonic Soulmates, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, rome continues to be The Worst, spoilers through mid s4, you can pry platonic and qpr soulmates from my cold dead hands
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-30
Updated: 2020-11-18
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:20:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 5,388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27289309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darknesscrochets/pseuds/darknesscrochets
Summary: Soulmate AU: when you first touch someone who will have a great impact on you, they leave a mark in a color unique to them.The Rangers all leave their marks on one another. Some bonds are meant to last.
Relationships: Azu & Celiquilliton "Cel" Sidebottom, Azu & Grizzop drik Acht Amsterdam, Azu & Sasha Racket, Azu & Zolf Smith, Celiquillithon "Cel" Sidebottom & Zolf Smith, Grizzop drik Acht Amsterdam & Sasha Racket, Hamid Saleh Haroun al-Tahan & Azu, Hamid Saleh Haroun al-Tahan & Celiquillithon "Cel" Sidebottom, Hamid Saleh Haroun al-Tahan & Grizzop drik Acht Amsterdam, Hamid Saleh Haroun al-Tahan & Sasha Racket, Hamid Saleh Haroun al-Tahan & Skraak, Hamid Saleh Haroun al-Tahan & Zolf Smith, Jasper & Celiquillithon "Cel" Sidebottom, Sasha Racket & Zolf Smith
Series: Rainbow Souls [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1999660
Comments: 48
Kudos: 55





	1. Zolf

**Author's Note:**

> All of the kudos to warrigan for betaing!

Zolf has many marks from his days before he formed the Rangers. Nearly all of them are the grey of death; the rest are folks he’s lost touch with, who never made that much of a mark on him in the first place. 

He’d have expected the one he gets from Bertie would be the same, but the man leaves an ugly orange stain on his palm when they shake hands. (On Bertie’s, the mark is much less deep. Bertie always did have an outsized effect on those around him.)

Though he technically meets Sasha earlier, Zolf gets a mark from Hamid first. It’s in the sewers, of all places, Zolf reaching up and Hamid reaching down, clasping hands. He doesn’t have a chance to check under his gloves until later, when they’re tromping up the stairs towards Upper London, but he takes a moment to stare at the two-toned bronze and purple mark on his hand. It’s the first and last he’s ever seen like that, not as vibrant as some of the others he’s gotten, but unforgettable in its own right. It’s almost pretty. It’s warm under his gloves, sometimes.

Sasha’s oil-slick silver, the kind of color you just can’t put a name to, he gets the first time he heals her. She’s lying on the ground after that huge explosion in Other London, and all he can do is hope she’s still clinging to enough life that he can heal her. He puts his hands to her burnt skin and _begs_ Poseidon for all he’s worth. When Sasha’s eyes open and Zolf pulls his hands away, the deep blue of his mark on her skin is clear as day, just barely touching the burn on her neck. His hands are a riot of colors now, and his fingers are stained silver, somehow distinct from the grey of a dead mark.

It seems they’re destined to have some sort of impact on each other. Zolf is already fond of Sasha; he doesn’t mind bearing the mark of their growing friendship where everyone can see.

He’d thought they’d have more time.

Prague, and everything that comes afterwards, are months that Zolf doesn’t like to think about. In the early days, his soul marks are a comfort that there are still people out there who care about him, even if he left them behind for all of their sakes. He’s not in a great mindset for a while, but Sasha’s mark goes _weird_ those first few weeks after he leaves them, fading in and out until one day the silver comes back all at once, more striking than ever.

And then, a few weeks later, it goes grey.

Both hers and Hamid’s do, colors washing out in a single moment of--not pain. He felt the pain in a flash when Feryn died, and when his other marks faded, some in an instant, others drawn out. This isn’t anything like that. His--he won’t call them soulmates, he won’t, it’s already hard to think of losing them when they’re just--his _friends_ are just gone. As though they’ve dropped out of this plane into one he can’t reach.

That day is a bad day. One of his lowest since the airship. Zolf doesn’t lose himself at the bottom of a bottle, but the numbness creeps up even without the help of alcohol.

He claws himself out of that pit, day by day, even as the world itself tumbles down into it. It helps to have a purpose, hunting the kraken, and it helps more to have new marks gracing his skin, gifts from his new team. Wilde’s mark is as strong as ever, and that bolsters him, too, more than he’ll ever let the man know.

Hamid’s mark bursts back into being without warning. Zolf’s minding his own business one second, and the next his hand is on fire. Feels like it, at least. Purple-bronze seeps out of the center of the grey, slow at first but picking up speed, until the whole mark on his hand is as bright as that day in the sewers under London.

Sasha’s mark doesn’t come back. The silver is gone, and even a letter from days long past doesn’t keep him from missing it. Missing her.

It doesn’t get easier, the grey on his fingers. But he gets used to it. Stops thinking of her every time he looks down. But he doesn’t think she’ll become just another grey mark, the way some of his have. He hasn’t forgotten Feryn, either, though his brother’s dependable brown couldn’t have been more different from her unique silver. 

If his feelings about Sasha bubble closer to the surface some days, well… that’s alright. Zolf knows how to handle loss.


	2. Hamid

Hamid is practically born with many of his soul marks. His family all leave deep, vibrant colors on his arms; kids tease him in school that he’s a walking rainbow, festooned with all the colors anyone could ever want. He doesn’t care; they remind him that there’s people who love him, some of them even unconditionally.

(He doesn’t like to think about his father, and how deep his father’s green is on the back of his hand, compared to the small, pale purple handprint he’s seldom glimpsed on his father’s arm.)

University is hard, for Hamid. He doesn’t make a lot of close friends; despite dating Liliana, the only real mark he receives is Gideon’s. He doesn’t like the way it clashes with his sister Aziza’s rose-colored handprint. It’s deep, though, the deep of a strong and impactful relationship. 

Hamid figures out, later, that marks can be about bad things, too.

Hamid and Zolf mark each other early, leaving blue and bronze and purple for everyone to see. For all that they spend weeks fighting alongside one another, though, Hamid doesn’t get a mark from Sasha until Prague. He’d thought that something might have happened in the safe room in their hotel in Paris, when Sasha hugged him and Zolf, but something about it canceled out both marks and magic; and marks didn’t… _stay_ , in the Paris-that-wasn’t that Mister Ceiling created for them.

No, it isn’t until Prague, when Sasha grabs him to keep him safe from the Cult of Mars, that Hamid feels something. Her hand on his arm, for a fleeting moment before she flings him bodily towards the door. A moment is all that it takes to form a mark, and looking back, he sees Sasha’s hand is bronze and purple now.

Hamid thinks about it, locked in a room by a cultist, with no one to talk to but himself. He hopes she isn’t disappointed that his mark on her is in such an obvious place. 

(He hopes it’s something _good_ they’ve done to each other, whatever it is that the universe has decided deserves to live in full color on their skin. They could both use something good right now.)

He doesn’t realize until later that night, crying himself to sleep in an unfamiliar university room, that he has a mark from Grizzop now, too. A dark forest green, all around his torso. He doesn’t remember getting it; the time he spent as a creature under the Feeblemind spell is hazy. It’s still a comfort, though, and he falls asleep looking at it and at the rainbows on his arms. He tries not to think about Aziza’s rose mark, now a dull grey. 

Meeting Azu is like a gift from the gods--and she may be one in truth, given she’s a paladin of Aphrodite. Her enthusiasm for life is like a balm to the wounds in his soul. Her touch is like a gift too, her color a dusky pink that stands out against his brown skin. Hamid’s almost sad that the color is hidden under his clothes, the mark from the touch of her arm picking him up to carry him into the Temple of Aphrodite.

Hamid is pleased Azu accepts his offer to join their group. He wants the chance to get to know this person who’s left such a mark on him, and who bears his own two-toned mark on her arm like a badge of honor.

He gets that chance, as they travel together across Cairo, then on to Damascus, and then Rome. 

Rome is a test, for all of them.

Hamid is afraid, if he gets the chance to look, that another of his marks will have gone grey. He doesn’t want to lose another sibling, another color faded from the rainbow on his arms. 

It has, but he doesn’t know that, distracted fighting and sneaking their way into the center of Rome. Everything goes weird there, especially magic, and soul marks are not immune. Ishak’s mark, wobbling between sad grey and sunshine yellow for days, flushes with vibrant color when Eldarion shifts them all onto another plane on their desperate attempt to rescue friends and family. It comes back, cheery yellow to his twin Ismail’s bright green.

Zolf’s mark changes color too, when they all tumble out of the Hades plane back onto solid ground.

It’s subtle, a shift from dark blue to light. Hamid only takes note of it in Japan, when he has a moment to--not breathe, not in the quarantine cell, but take stock, as it were. He doesn’t question it; he can see how Zolf has changed, and Hamid likes to think he’s not the person he was months ago, either.

He doesn’t notice back in Rome, though, because he’s too busy looking at the empty spaces where two of his teammates, his friends, used to be. 

Hamid remembers how it had _hurt_ when Aziza died, sudden and sharp, piercing through the storm that was the influence of Feeblemind. He hadn’t felt anything during the planar shift, coming back from a god’s realm, and that--

He hopes, for a moment, that they’re just… somewhere else. Displaced, but still alive.

Hamid shrugs off his jacket. There’s grey on his arm where Sasha’s silver used to be. He slowly covers the mark with his hand; his hand is smaller than Sasha’s was, and the grey peeks out around the edges of his fingers. 

He doesn’t have to look under his suit to know that there’s matching grey on his torso, where Grizzop’s forest green once was.

The grief is sharper, in this universe. When Zolf asks after Sasha, the first time they’ve seen each other in a year and a half (a month, it’s been a _month_ since his sister died), he can’t answer. Just shakes his head, tears threatening once again, the same way they have for the last few days as they jumped from Rome to Cairo and finally to Japan. 

Hamid has seen Zolf’s body, covered in grey splotches. He doesn’t want to think about what that does to a person, losing so many of your soulmates. What it’s done to Zolf, to lose another. Hamid still has his family, has only lost a few marks in his short life, and those alone hurt _so much_. 

Strangely, the mark from a random kobold--Skraak, they soon learn--helps. Hamid still feels all jumbled up, tackling Shoin’s dungeon with no chance to rest, but it brings him hope and scares him so much at the same time. 

Hope, because he can still touch a single person, and they can affect him, enough to leave a deep, ruby red on his skin. And fear, because he knew Gideon and Bertie and so many awful people growing up, and he’s scared their marks are omens of ill things to come.

The color of Skraak’s mark is close enough that it reminds him of Aziza’s. It hurts, to hope for and fear a single thing so much, but Hamid thinks he’ll take it, to have a rainbow’s worth of soul marks on his arms again.


	3. Sasha

Growing up, few people leave a mark on Sasha, and Sasha doesn’t touch a lot of people either.

For a long time, her only mark is from Brock, a red band on her finger from their first pinkie promise as little kids.

(They promised they’d always have each others’ backs. It hurts, when she leaves Paris, and the mark finally loses the last of its red to the grey of a lost soulmate. It hurts because Brock _kept_ that promise, even when Sasha couldn’t.)

Barrett never touches Sasha. She’s never sure if that’s a blessing or a curse. The man had such rigid control over her life, dictated all of her thoughts and fears even when she thought she was free from him.

But she never has to live with his mark on her skin. Years later, in a time and place far away from Other London, she decides she’s happy about that.

Eldarion despaired of marks; she always said they were unsightly for a lady of high standing to display. (Left unspoken, was that for an infiltrator, a spy, unique marks were something to be covered up. Hidden. Bonds were dangerous, and physical manifestations of them even moreso.) The first time Eldarion dresses her up like a doll, she leaves an inky-purple mark on Sasha’s shoulder, quickly covered up. Sasha never had many marks, but she still hates the feeling of makeup covering her skin, strapped into a dress she couldn’t run in, hair long and braided back.

Eldarion’s is the first and last mark Sasha gets for a while, until she meets Bi Ming Gusset a few years later. After that, it’s longer still.

Sasha doesn’t think her skin will ever be the eye-catching display of color she’s seen on some people, but the Rangers leave their marks on her, in time. 

Zolf heals her, first. After the explosion in Other London, she bears both a scar and a dark blue handprint on her neck. She gives Grizzop a hand up from a pit under the opera house, and she grabs Hamid in Prague University; lifting them both to safety and away from threats leaves their own marks. Brock’s grey will always be on her finger, but one of her hands is Grizzop-green now, the other Hamid-bronze-purple.

Sitting on a bed that’s too soft in the al-Tahan mansion in Cairo, Sasha decides it might be… nice, to be reminded that she has use beyond just her skills. That people _like_ her, that she can have an impact on them, and they on her. Even if the marks make her too recognizable, too memorable, for her to really be _comfortable_ with the whole thing.

That people might remember her when she dies is a new idea, for Sasha. She hopes it doesn’t hurt them too much when she succumbs to Mister Ceiling’s fucked up resurrection.

(She knows it will. Hurt, that is. Brock’s did, when it finally went grey.) 

Despite spending days in close proximity in Cairo, Sasha and Azu don’t mark each other in that time. Sasha’s never been the most comfortable with casual touch at the best of times, and being undead makes it worse.

She does get a mark, though; from Eren Fairhands, of all people. The healer saved her soul, pretty much, so when Sasha thinks about it later, she’s not surprised to have their pale, almost icy green on her forearms.

That day, Sasha learns that some marks can represent a single moment of good, even as others spring from years of hatred.

Azu and Sasha mark each other, later, in the tunnels under Damascus. They’re fighting through some of the most professional traps Sasha’s ever seen (she can handle them, though, and if she can’t, well, Sasha isn’t telling). One of them _does_ get the better of her, and even though they’re all prepared, all expecting it, she nearly drowns in that trapped, featureless room.

Azu pulls her back, pulls her out of the water. Azu’s right hand hits the end of the rope, and the other goes around Sasha’s bicep, hauling her back. She feels--something. Something familiar.

Grizzop yells, and Sasha just… can’t. She wanders down the hallway to--not to sulk. Mourn her favorite dagger. She resets her wrist sheaths, comforted by the ice and fire daggers that she still has, and takes the chance to peek under her jacket while her friends’ eyes are elsewhere. Azu’s mark spreads over her upper arm, a dusky pink distinct from Sasha’s pale Other London skin.

She looks back, and catches a glimpse of Azu, hands gesturing in the air for a moment as she says something to Grizzop and Hamid. Her left hand is silver, from wrist to fingertips.

(Sasha wonders if this is what Hamid feels like, with so many soul marks on his arms. It’s strange to her, that she has _two_ on one limb. She can’t imagine half a dozen colors, all jumbled together. So many people. So many _soulmates_.)

In the end, in Rome, hundreds of miles away and thousands of years removed… Sasha’s grateful to have the marks, few as they are, full of life and color. Relieved, too, that they don’t go grey and lifeless and dead.

She was afraid they might. She used to hate them on her worse days, how they marked her out as someone recognizable, when all she wanted was to fade into the shadows. But now, surrounded by the family she made for herself, she’s glad of the reminder of who she used to be. The friends--no, the _soulmates_ \--that she used to have.

_Still_ has. Grizzop’s deep, forest green is grey now, but Zolf’s blue, Hamid’s strange bronze-purple, even Azu’s gentle pink--they’re all still there. She has so many more now, too, from Sagax and Amidus, Riz and Azus and Lil’ Wilde, all her children. 

Her silver adorns every one of them, the mark of a matriarch of a family not by blood but of choice.

If Grizzop is out there somewhere, watching over her from Artemis’s plane, she thinks he’d be proud of her. She’s proud of herself, too.


	4. Grizzop

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning for major character death has been added. ...it’s rome, y'all.

Grizzop’s entire body is more soul mark than skin, when he’s young. His clutch all leave marks on each other, some more than others, but everyone has at least a few. Limbs all decorated with their _love-trust-care_ for each other. How they all work to keep the clutch together, keep them safe.

All of them go grey in one terrifying moment. Grizzop’s not sure he won’t join them, until Eva appears.

She takes him into the Cult of Artemis, trains him as a paladin, and he bears her mark as proudly as he does the symbol of Artemis. Human hands are large, compared to goblin ones, and her solid reddish-brown handprints overlap the dead marks on his forearms. Eva’s hands are stained his own forest-green in turn, a color that once adorned every member of his clutch.

He meets another goblin at some point, who goes by Vesseek. Their olive green marks Grizzop’s leg, covering some of the grey there.

Grizzop doesn’t mark anyone else in the Cult, and neither do they leave marks on him. He doesn’t really care. Grizzop’s independent, and proud of it. He has Artemis’s blessing now; that’s enough to keep him going. 

(Some nights, falling asleep alone in another new city, he thinks it might be nice, to have a family again. Have a clutch again. He stores this thought with all the other things he wants that aren’t useful; pointless daydreams to keep himself occupied on slow days and long hunts.)

He and Sasha nearly meet, nearly mark each other, in the Temple of Artemis in Prague. They nearly do, but they don’t.

Instead, Grizzop meets Sasha and Hamid and Bertie fighting zombies, and his first impression of Sasha is _skilled_ , but not someone who stands out. He rethinks that assessment again and again, until she is one of the most important people he will ever hold dear. The marks they give each other, when she hauls him out of a zombie pit under the opera house in Prague, only reinforce this feeling.

Over the years, Grizzop had forgotten what it was like to look at his arms and see something other than reddish-brown and grey. He could never mistake Sasha’s sleek silver for either of those colors, distinct and vibrant as it is on his right hand.

Grizzop leaves a mark on Hamid that same night, though Grizzop never knows it. Hamid’s lizard-creature scales hide Grizzop’s forest green, and Hamid doesn’t bring it up afterwards. (There’s no right time to ask, in Prague, and after Cairo, Hamid trusts Grizzop with his body, but not his soul, anymore.)

Hamid’s own colors grace Grizzop’s left palm, purple and bronze winking at him from the corner of his eye every time he nocks an arrow and takes aim with his bow.

Azu and Grizzop get off on the wrong foot, when she picks him up in the Temple of Aphrodite, but they leave marks on each other regardless. Grizzop’s never had a mark on his stomach before. He’s not sure if he’s fond of the pink, but he settles in to get to know this paladin of Aphrodite anyways.

The last mark Grizzop ever gets, the last one he ever _gives_ , is Oscar Wilde's.

He doesn't know that at the time, of course; what he does know is that this incredibly aggravating man is killing himself to keep their team working. When he touches Wilde’s head, Grizzop leaves a hand’s worth of forest green on Wilde’s ear. Grizzop’s own fingers turn a bright crimson; he doesn’t realize until later that it’s a mark, not blood. (Grizzop hopes Wilde never notices the mark he left on Grizzop’s skin. The man makes enough jokes as it is, when he’s not being cursed.)

At the rate he’s been accumulating marks again, these past few months as a mercenary and paladin-errant, Grizzop wonders if it’ll get to the point where he can’t see the grey anymore. He gets to Rome, though, and he doesn’t have a chance to add any more colors to his collection. 

He doesn’t have a chance, because Grizzop dies.

The marks on your body don’t fade, when you die. Grizzop already knew this, but he doesn’t see his own body when he dies.

He doesn’t see Sasha’s oil-slick silver and Hamid’s purple-bronze, splattered with blood. He doesn’t see how spears pierce through Azu’s pink in three places.

When Grizzop wakes up in his Lady Artemis’s plane, what he sees are his marks, unmarred by the wounds that killed him. 

(Of course marks come with you when you die. They’re _soul_ marks, after all.)

Grizzop, ever the hunter, takes stock of his ethereal body, awash with color. The familiar pink and purple and bronze and silver overlap with colors he hasn’t seen since his clutch died. Sky blue. Ochre yellow. Grass green, snow white, shining gold; colors he hasn’t seen on his body since he was three years old in Amsterdam and surrounded by his clutch. His siblings.

All of his marks glow with an inner light, like the gentlest of rainbows.

Grizzop grins his sharp-toothed grin, nocks an arrow, and heads off to see what’s next.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is sad, so consider: technically i think grizzop punching wilde in the balls would have been a mark :) let’s say the bank vault magic interfered with marks in some way.


	5. Azu

Azu has marks from her family and childhood friends, of course, and of those, her brother Emeka’s is the deepest, the color most apparent. 

It still pales in comparison to the vibrant ruby red left on her cheek by a travelling paladin of Aphrodite.

Her fiance isn’t pleased about that, nor about her leaving to follow the call of a goddess. Azu doesn’t care--well, she does care. She knows that she’s hurt his feelings, and she is hurt in turn that he won’t accompany her to follow her dream. But she won’t let it stop her from achieving something extraordinary. 

Azu gains few marks during her time in seminary, learning to be a paladin of Aphrodite. She’s alright with that; though she would love to meet more of her soulmates--and she’s sure she has some out there--this period of her life is a time for learning, not for relationships.

(She didn’t start seminary in this frame of mind. There was a woman; a fellow paladin in training, dedicated to Aphrodite. Azu learns, in this time, that not all relationships leave a mark.)

Azu’s sure, if they were ever to shake hands, ever brush past each other in the hallways of the Temple, that Eren Fairhands would leave a mark on her.

They never touch, in her time as a student, but she knows. 

Some souls never get the chance to meet. To leave their colors on skin, even as the people embodying them leave marks of a more intangible form on each other’s lives. 

Azu is happy with the marks she has, but it almost feels like a slight to Aphrodite, to let a mark pass by. To let a _soulmate_ pass by. It’s part--a small part, but there nonetheless--of why she agrees to join the mercenary company she rescues from a sandstorm in the middle of the city.

The skin of Azu’s arms is adorned with the colors of her new friends: Hamid’s purple-bronze on her left, and Grizzop’s deep forest green on her right. They stand out vibrant and clear against her dark brown skin. She would bare them proudly, were she not wearing the armor of her goddess. (She thinks Aphrodite would understand. Her Lady is the patron of love, after all, and what can marks be but love, distilled in its purest form and painted on your skin for all to see?)

In a secret factory under the hills of Damascus, Azu gains her third mark from a treasured companion.

She knows that Sasha isn’t fond of touch, of being touched by others, and rarely initiates contact herself. Perhaps it was inevitable that their marks on each other should come from a chance moment, forced under pressure; and yet, Azu would not give Sasha’s mark up for the world.

It hurts, when they land back in the untouched center of a ruined city, missing two of their team. Missing two of their _soulmates_. 

It hurts more to see Hamid check for Sasha’s silver, and find only grey. 

A grey mirrored on Azu’s own hand, in place of a mark she’d only just gained.

It hurts, to only know that their companions are dead, and not know how or why. To wonder if it was drawn out or quick; whether they died alone or together. Azu hopes to find out, someday. To finally close that chapter of their lives, of their loss, so they can properly grieve.

They do get that closure, eventually. Azu lights candles for them, the light flickering on the grey mark on her palm. Through the tears, it almost looks like Sasha’s oil-slick silver.

She takes comfort in knowing Sasha found a family of her own, again. Azu wonders if Sasha would be pleased to know that Azu has picked up her own mark from Zolf; that the family Sasha left behind is bound together by more than a shared mission.

Azu has learned, like Hamid did, that soul marks do not always signal a bond meant to last. That sometimes, you can mark someone, and lose them, all within the span of days. 

But it is still good, she thinks, to have a group tied together by more than common purpose. She believes in the power of marks, the power of a group bonded together by their hearts.

By their very souls.

Azu believes it will be enough to hold them together, in the face of whatever comes next.


	6. Cel

Cel is like Zolf, in a lot of ways, and completely unlike him in many others. They’ve both had many soulmates in their lives, touched and been touched by so many people that it’s hard to keep track.

They’re both covered in grey, too. Loss has been a constant in Cel’s life, ever since they were young. People have such an impact on them, and they’ve met so many people over the course of their life. 

Met and lost and kept going, even as the grey of those left behind overtakes the colors of those still around. 

It’s rarer than you think, two people having the same level of effect on each other. So many people, Cel has left bright marks on, who have barely touched their own life; and it’s the same the other way around, colorful marks on their own skin that turned grey all too soon.

A constant reminder of their mistakes, and how _easy_ it is to fuck everything up.

The mark they get from Jasper, shaking his hand, is the first one in years. Maybe decades; Cel hasn’t kept track of time wandering across continents and seas alike. It might be what convinces them to stay, that vibrant sky blue on their hand, and their own matching lime green on Jasper’s.

They spend a while in that village, setting up shop, teaching an apprentice, making a home. 

They leave a few marks, here and there. More than once one of Shoin’s grunts leaves their village with a new mark from a fight; single moments, Cel has learned, can have a lasting impact. (They hope it’s a good one. They fear it won’t be.)

Years pass, and no one leaves a mark the way Jasper did. Until, one day, three people show up out of nowhere, barging into their village and making demands on their time, on their _patience_. Cel isn’t a very patient person on a good day, and they’ve already been attacked once.

The dwarf, who they learn is named Zolf, deescalates the situation. They grasp forearms in greeting, and the negotiation becomes a conversation, all at once.

(Cel is tired of having a negative impact on their soulmates. Of scaring people. Becoming the monster that haunts their dreams. If they can help these people take Shoin down, maybe… maybe they can do something good again. If they haven’t forgotten how.)

Zolf’s blue is similar and different from Jasper’s, but Cel’s lime green is visible a mile away on Zolf’s arm. It’s the first mark they gain from the group, but it isn’t the last. 

Azu grabs their ankle, from under the water in one pitch black room in Shoin’s… Lair? Labs? Dungeon? Whichever it is, normally Cel would be afraid at a strange touch in a place like this, but they’ve lived so long that they know the feeling of a mark when it forms. 

Cel doesn’t actually know what color Azu’s soul is, but they can hazard a guess. It’s been a while since they’ve had a pink mark.

The next time they have a moment to breathe, Cel checks their ankle, sees the dusky pink. When they look up, they can see Azu’s palm has bright green over the grey that used to be there.

Azu catches them looking, and sends a little smile their way, before refocusing on the door to the next room. 

Cel feels like smiling, themself. It’s been a while since they felt like someone was truly _happy_ to bear their soul mark.

At some point, they pick up Hamid’s mark too. They’ve seen his purple and bronze mark on both Azu and Zolf, and they’re so curious about what sort of soul makes _two_ colors. Cel looks down, walking through one featureless hallway like so many others they’ve all trodden through, and the back of their forearm is bronze and purple, where before there was only grey. 

From Hamid’s arm, they see a little lime green, poking out from underneath his jacket. It doesn’t look like he’s noticed.

Cel is not good at not noticing. They’ve touched too many people, gained and lost too many souls, not to notice.

You’d think, with all their experience with it, Cel would be good at handling loss.

They’re not.

They'll never be used to a mark turning grey, whether it happens in a year or an instant. Joining up with a mercenary group, and long-term at that, Cel can only hope they're not setting themself up to lose one more mark, one more color.

They will; lose them, that is. But Cel doesn't know that. All they can try, right now, is to do their best to keep their soulmates alive.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> that wraps this one up, folks! thanks for reading. check out the series for potential follow ups, though i promise nothing concrete.
> 
> thanks again to warrigan for beta reading all of these chapters!

**Author's Note:**

> Love to the writing rangers, and special shoutout to ally who suggested that marks turn grey when someone dies.


End file.
